All the Things Between Us
by mosylu
Summary: Jesse has a crush, and she's not sure what to do about it. She's used to being the crushee, not the crusher. Also, he's from a different world. No, literally. Quickwest cuteness.


(A/N) For the date prompt: "stargazing" from shasta627 on Tumblr. New ship for me, so be kind.

Also, I have no idea how Earth-2 history differs from Earth-1, except for the War of the Americas. I just kind of wanted to riff on the idea of differences.

* * *

She and Wally had talked themselves hoarse and squinted at data until it swam in front of their eyes, but for some reason, Jesse still wasn't ready for the day to be done.

"Well," she said, running her fingers through her hair. "I'm sick of speedster experiments. You?"

"Yep, pretty well fried."

Cisco had opened a short breach and Wally had jumped universes for the day so he and Jesse could compare their blooming speedster skills. "It just doesn't do any good to compare it with Barry's," Jesse had said when trying to talk her dad into the visit. "There's something different about us."

Wally's powers were developing in different ways from hers, but Jesse could already see similarities between their use of the Speed Force, what tripped them up, how it affected their bodies. They were different than Barry. Less different than each other.

Wally checked his phone. "According to this, I've got about an hour until I have to catch the cross-world Cisco Express," he said.

"But that hour could go by in fifteen minutes," she reminded him.

"Or six hours," he agreed.

His Earth and Jesse's (she refused to call her home Earth-2, it was _her_ Earth-1. As far as she was concerned, _Wally_ was from Earth-2) had a weird time thing going on. They didn't sync up consistently. One hour in one universe could be three in the other, or one minute.

Cisco and her dad were still trying to figure out why, but they'd managed to make an app so they at least knew what time it was on the other world. Not, as her dad growled, that it stopped Cisco from calling at 3 am their time.

Cisco had named the app Wibbly Wobbly and apparently thought that was very funny.

"So, what should we do with all this uncertain time we got?" Wally asked.

"I could show you Central City. My Central City." For some reason, she was blushing. What the hell? She never blushed for boys. Or girls. Anybody. She was Jesse Wells, they blushed in front of her.

But his eyes were warm and smiling, and her stomach was trying to make a break for it.

"That sounds like something I'd want a definite entire day for," he said. "At normal speed. What can we find to do around here?"

She thought. "Um - " She looked up. "Ever been to the roof of your Star Labs?"'

"Yeah - ?"

She grinned at him. "Race you." She bolted, and was up on the roof in a blink. He skidded to a halt next to her one blink later.

"Cheater-pants," he said, not even breathing hard.

"Please, I had a split nanosecond head start at most."

"Yeah, for us that's a lot. What's up here?"

She pointed. He looked up and his mouth fell open at the blanket of stars. "We're in the middle of the city," he said dazedly. "Why isn't light pollution a thing?"

She shrugged. "Something about where Star Labs is built. I don't know. It's gorgeous, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he breathed.

She ducked inside the emergency door for a moment and came back out with a thick blanket. "I keep this up here," she said, spreading it out. "You wanna - ?"

He blinked at it for a moment, and she felt herself blushing all over again. She'd meant it perfectly innocently - just something to lie on that wasn't concrete roof - but it didn't feel so innocent suddenly.

"Sure," he said, dropping down and stretching himself along half the blanket. She took the other half, and for such a big fluffy spread, it felt teeny tiny.

"So you do this a lot?" he asked.

"Yep," she said, tracing the familiar constellations with her eyes. "I pretty much always had the run of this place even before I got my speed."

"The princess of Star Labs."

She swatted his side.

"Hey, that was a compliment!"

"I'm not a princess," she said.

"Could fool me."

"I'm not!" She hated the thought.

"Okay, you're not, whatever."

She looked up at the stars, feeling her cheeks heat. _Jesse, you idiot. He didn't mean it like that._

But princess - like she was Rapunzel or something, and this was her ivory tower, and she was untouchable. She didn't want to be untouchable.

He shifted. "So, uh. What's your favorite constellation?"

She latched onto the topic with relief. Astronomy had been another one of her majors. "Well, Yggdrasil's pretty spectacular."

"Who-whatta?"

"You know! Yggsdrasil. The world tree?" She pointed. "You see the trunk there?"

"What I see is Orion and his belt."

"Orion?" She made a face. "Who's that?"

"Orion the hunter. No?" He rolled to his side and considered her for a moment. "I think I get it. Yggsdrasil is from Norse mythology, right?"

"Yeah."

"Are all the other constellations, too?"

"Well, yeah."

"Uh-huh." He laid back again. "Well, we call all the constellations by their Greek or Roman names."

She snorted. "Greeks and Romans? A bunch of shepherds and farmers that never got out of the Mediterranean? The Norsemen conquered most of the known world. They spread civilization south and east and connected Western Europe for centuries." Her third major had been Classical Studies and she could still recite the opening lines of the Poetic Edda in Dansk Tunga.

"Here they did," he said. "And yeah, on my earth they did a pretty fair job too. But it was the Romans that did that first."

She felt very far away from him suddenly. He was from a whole different universe. Somehow, this bifurcated history made him feel more alien even than going to their world.

(Romans? Seriously? They'd been decent engineers and all, but they were famous for being homebodies. How had they moved their asses out of their hills?)

"So," Wally said softly, "show me more of Yggsdrasil."

"Um," she said. "Well. There's the trunk, like I said, and the roots, and - "

"Isn't there, like, a snake that eats it or something?"

"Dragon," she said. "Nidhug. Look, there."

"Where?"

She shifted so she could point. Their shoulders bumped, and her breath caught. He turned his head and smiled at her with starlight in his eyes, and he wasn't far away anymore.

She smiled back, and for the moment, the fastest thing in the world was the slow wheel of stars over their heads.

FINIS


End file.
